News tagged with neutron

(Phys.org)—A new accreting millisecond X-ray pulsar (AMXP) has been found in one of our galaxy's most massive clusters, NGC 2808. The newly detected AMXP received designation MAXI J0911-655 and is part of an ultra-compact ...

A professional astrophysicist and an amateur astronomer have teamed up to reveal surprising details about an unusual millisecond pulsar (MSP) binary system comprising one of the fastest-spinning pulsars in our Galaxy and ...

Water is vital to life on Earth and its importance simply can't be overstated—it's also deeply rooted within our conscience that there's something extremely special about it. Yet, from a scientific point of view, much remains ...

Today (November 30), scientists restarted the twin detectors of LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory, after making several improvements to the system. Over the last year, they have made enhancements ...

By studying the light emitted from an extraordinarily dense and strongly magnetized neutron star using ESO's Very Large Telescope, astronomers may have found the first observational indications of a strange quantum effect, ...

A snapshot of the stellar life cycle has been captured in a new portrait from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Smithsonian's Submillimeter Array (SMA). A cloud that is giving birth to stars has been observed to reflect ...

The detector and electronics in a new neutron spectrometer that's being tested in space to monitor radiation for future manned NASA space missions were built and tested at the National Space Science and Technology Center ...

It's an intricate process through which massive stars lose their gas as they evolve, and a more complete understanding could be just calculations away—if only those calculations didn't take several millennia to run on normal ...

Metals travel forward in time at the Ion Accelerator Laboratory, a facility within Texas A&M University's Department of Nuclear Engineering and researchers within the department's Ion Beam Laboratory group are speeding up ...

Neutron

The neutron is a subatomic particle with no net electric charge and a mass slightly larger than that of a proton.

Neutrons are usually found in atomic nuclei. The nuclei of most atoms consist of protons and neutrons, which are therefore collectively referred to as nucleons. The number of protons in a nucleus is the atomic number and defines the type of element the atom forms. The number of neutrons determines the isotope of an element. For example, the carbon-12 isotope has 6 protons and 6 neutrons, while the carbon-14 isotope has 6 protons and 8 neutrons.

While bound neutrons in stable nuclei are stable, free neutrons are unstable; they undergo beta decay with a lifetime of just under 15 minutes (885.7 ± 0.8 s). Free neutrons are produced in nuclear fission and fusion. Dedicated neutron sources like research reactors and spallation sources produce free neutrons for the use in irradiation and in neutron scattering experiments.

Even though it is not a chemical element, the free neutron is sometimes included in tables of nuclides. It is then considered to have an atomic number of zero and a mass number of one.